Re: [Qemu-discuss] Access hardware GPU from Qemu

[Mike Lovell]

On 02/10/2012 04:42 AM, Daniel Kraft wrote:
> I have a Nvidia GeForce GT 520M in my notebook, but so far I was not
> able to get the correct driver in my Debian system.  (I'm new to
> Debian, though, so I probably just missed the correct installation
> procedure yet.)
>
> Since I only want to use it for special purposes (namely, running CUDA
> calculations), I wonder whether I could install Windows in a Qemu
> system and run the calculations there.  Is it possible to make Qemu
> access the GPU for hardware acceleration even when the host system
> does not have appropriate drivers?  Something like giving the guest
> system full hardware access to the graphics card?
>
> Maybe that's a stupid idea, but I'm no expert in virtualization stuff.

its not a stupid idea. there are several cases where using a gpu in a 
guest makes sense.

what are the rest of the hardware details of the laptop?

it is possible assuming you have the correct hardware and system 
support. passing access to a pci device to a guest requires vt-d on 
intel systems or iommu support on amd systems. also, just cause your cpu 
and/or chip set has support for these technologies, its possible the 
BIOS doesn't have support or has broken support. its still kind of hit 
or miss on support for these things. i have a system with a MSI z68 
motherboard and a core i7-2600 and was able to pass through the usb3 
controller to a windows guest properly. passing through a gpu for 
computation stuff should be about the same but it wont take over as the 
boot vga device. it will operate as a second video card in the guest.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/How_to_assign_devices_with_VT-d_in_KVM has 
some decent instructions on setting this up. 
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/lnxinfo/v3r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fliaat%2Fliaatbppassthrougtask.htm 
is another link that has similar details.

mike